Matt Deacon (Microsoft Architect) has an interesting diagram that has come out of the meetings at WAX. It represents the user significant drivers and represents them as ‘The World of Me’. Unfortunately the web version of the post is a bit of a mess so you have to scroll down to find it.
Make sure you also read this article so that it all makes sense.
BetaNews is reporting some statements from Microsoft about their ‘battle with Microsoft.
Others downplayed Google’s battle with Microsoft. While saying the Redmond giant has a history of “not playing fair,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said his company was just too busy with its own products and services to watch what Microsoft was doing. Fellow co-founder Larry Page added that they wanted to focus on innovation instead.
I’ve never seen the primary battle as one between Microsoft and Google. The primary battle is the one to stay ahead of the rest of the pack. While these two companies have dominant positions the IT arena has still got so much change to go through that any dominance that they have today will only continue if they carry on running ahead of the pack. There is still a lot of disruptive technology out there and and load still to be discovered.
There is still plenty of time for them to both become fossils.
Oh, and while we are on the subject of gadgets. LiveSide is reporting on the new Microsoft Live LifeCam’s. Coming out of the Microsoft Peripherals division these are Web Cams with reasonably high definition and reasonably high prices .
What a name though Windows Live LifeCam , why Windows Live why not just LiveCam, what has a camera got to do with Life. But naming is another subject altogether. If you are interested in the subject you might find this interesting, but not much .
I have always thought it would be cool to move away from the big screen experience and move the experience up close – into my glasses.
The Kowon LCD DMB Glasses look like fun. Oh, and they will pick up a digital TV signal, so you can watch whatever rubbish it is that they are chucking out. And that for me is the problem, I don’t ever see myself wanting to be so immersed in a television program that I don’t want to see what else is going on around me. Television is way too boring to grab all of my attention.
But are they really cool? What do you think. Of course not, they just make you look like a geek, or an alien, or someone who just wants to hide from the rest of the world.
Do I ever see myself buying some? No, but they do look like fun, and it’s a lot more interesting to report than the last break-through in really big LCD screens that no-one can afford.
IBM are advertising a residency to create a Red Book for Exchange to Domino and Notes.
This intrigues me at a number of levels.
IBM complain regularly and bitterly about all of the ammunition that Microsoft throw their way on Notes/Domino to Outlook/Exchange migration and yet they are only now seeking to update a Red Book that deals with Exchange 5.5 migrations. Migrations from Exchange 5.5 might be their best target, but it leaves all of those users who are already on Exchange 2000/2003 with no assistance. Has this really been a wise investment of their efforts.
Also, though, why a residency. Surely IBM should already know how the migration should happen, haven’t they already done it? Now don’t get me wrong here, I applaud them for listening to expertise outside IBM. My concern is that they haven’t already got a proven approach to this problem that they could just spit out. Or perhaps I’m missing the monumental change in Notes/Domino 7 that made such a radical change to this problem when compared to Notes/Domino 6.5.
Are the gloves really off?
When I speak to IBM they tell me they have a reasonable stream of users making the switch away from Exchange, but all I get are customers switching the other way, or at least considering it.
Sometimes thoughts last for days because they are prompted by something new each day. My ramblings yesterday about questions have been stoked by a story from The Coyote Within and by comments from Richard Schwartz.
To update someone else’s catch-phrase – ‘It’s the questions, stupid’.
I have been catching up on some reading, today’s reading was: Monitoring and Troubleshooting Microsoft.com a really interesting article on how Microsoft have constructed their organisation and technology to tackle the operation of one of the world’s busiest Internet sites.
A few things struck me.
They obviously have the same monitoring problems as the rest of us:
“Left to their default configurations, most monitoring systems generate an excessive number of alerts that become like spam to administrators. Especially with large systems, it is important for organizations to carefully define what should be monitored and what events or combination of events should be raised to the attention of operations personnel. An organization must also plan to learn from the data collected. As with alert planning, this aspect of the solution is a significant undertaking. It requires creating data retention and aggregation policies, and combining and correlating all of the data into a data warehouse from which administrators can generate both predefined and impromptu reports.”
But have got to a point where:
“The overall system processes over 60,000 alerts a day, conducts approximately 11.5 million availability tests a day, parses 1.7 terabytes of IIS log data a day, and collects 185 million performance counters a day at a sampling rate of 45 seconds. However, to reach this degree of monitoring sophistication was a long process and required significant effort and cross-organizational coordination.”
I’m not sure whether those numbers indicate ‘monitoring sophistication’ or not.
The other thing was the ability of Microsoft to leverage internal resources and to operate a continuous improvement methodology that genuinely improved things. These things are incredibly difficult in large organisations.
“After implementing and stabilizing the asset management and reactive monitoring systems, the focus of the operations team shifted to proactive testing of applications and defining proactive monitoring events.”
and
“The testing process also helps to determine what events are meaningful, and what corrective actions are appropriate in the case of those events. All of the information learned from transactional and stress testing is thoroughly documented as part of the release management process of the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) that many of the development teams use.”
and
“The operations team wants to create a common eventing and logging class, based on recommendations from the Microsoft Patterns and Practices group, with deep application tracing.”
It’s very easy to implement something and then to leave it alone because it’s working, that is until it stops working. When it stops working that’s when the problems start because people expect thing to be as they left them when they implemented them and they never are. Changes occur, the best thing you can do is make sure the changes contribute to improvement rather than to service entropy.
The other day I was questioning whether we had reached a point of international writers block. Today, out of the blue and via an unexpected link I came across Slow Leadership.
Slow Leadership opposes the pressure for homogeneity in leadership, especially the urge to equate leadership purely with getting short-term results. That’s the equivalent of defining diet as fast food—an endless supply of burgers, fries and sodas—just because that type of meal is quick, simple and cheap. Leadership is far more than producing results in short order. Leadership is the art of finding the right way forward, not just for today but for as far ahead as you can reasonably see. It’s not an activity that can be reduced to simplistic rules-of-thumb and numbered lists of “to-dos.” There’s no Leadership 101 to cover all normal situations; no Leadership-by-Numbers kit you can buy via the Internet.
Yes please – I’ll take some Slow Leadership.
I love having a new thought stream, something that gets me thinking.
One of the questions I am asked regularly (too regularly) regards the relative merits of email products, mainly Notes/Domino and Outlook/Exchange.
Most often: “We are considering a move from Notes/Domino to Outlook/Exchange can you tell us what the possible benefits would be?”
Less often (almost never): “We are considering a move away from Outlook/Exchange to Notes/Domino can you tell us what the possible benefits would be?”
I normally follow this by another set of questions along the lines of:
“Well what do actually use Notes/Domino for?”
“Well what do you use Outlook/Exchange for?”
“Do you use and Notes/Domino applications?”
“What applications do you have integrated into Outlook/Exchange?”
The result of these questions is nearly always that this particular customer is primarily an email users with some exploitation of calendaring and task type operations. Notes/Domino customer regularly have applications in the form of Notes/Domino databases but they aren’t clear what the business value of them is. Outlook/Exchange users also have other applications which integrate into their email infrastructure but aren’t clear on their value.
My advice to them and to anyone else who asks: There is no compelling business reason to switch for email functions.
It’s actually the wrong question for most customers. The right question for most customers is this “I am wanting to move beyond email being the only way my people collaborate how can I facilitate that”. That question would result in a completely different answer and may result in a change of email infrastructure.
In a world where we are increasingly information rich and question poor I am spending more and more of my time telling people what the correct question is rather than telling them information. Are we seeing a change in the role of the advisor and the consultant. People can find the answer to any question quite quickly, what they can’t do is find someone to tell them what the right question is.
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